CHICAGO — Mattie Smith Colin, a reporter for the Chicago Defender, was dispatched to a Chicago train station in 1955 to cover the return of Emmett Till’s body.

A deeply moving experience, covering what would become a flashpoint in the civil rights movement, Colin eloquently captured the anguish of Till’s mother as her young, black son, slain in Mississippi after reportedly whistling at a white woman, was returned to her.

This is a portion of Colin’s story in the Defender:

“‘Oh, God, Oh God, my only boy,'” Mrs. Mamie (Till) Bradley wailed as five men lifted a soiled paper-wrapped bundle from a brown, wooden mid-Victorian box at the Illinois Central Station in Chicago Friday and put it into a waiting hearse.

“The bundle was the bruised and bullet-ridden body of little 14-year-old Emmett L. Till of Chicago, who had been lynched down in Money, Mississippi,” Colin wrote.

‘EMPATHY AND CHARACTER’

Colin also was at Till’s funeral, where his mother insisted on an open casket to expose the horror of what had happened to her son. Images of his mutilated body were printed in the Chicago Defender and made international news.

“Mattie was a gifted and highly intelligent writer whose heart was open to the truth,” said Col. Eugene F. Scott, the publisher of the Chicago Defender during the 1990s. “She had empathy and character, and could tell the kinds of stories that nobody else could.”

Colin, 98, who also worked for the Chicago Park District and the Department of Streets and Sanitation before retiring at age 93, died Dec. 6 at the Warren Barr Living and Rehab Center in Chicago after a recent stroke.

Through her affiliations and work with the Defender, Colin came to know scores of local and national politicians and was an invited guest at the presidential inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson. She also served as grand marshal of the Bud Billiken Parade, the largest African-American parade in the nation.

“She had done and seen so much but rarely talked about her own achievements,” longtime friend Esther Barnett said. “She was a very modest woman and always more interested in what you were doing rather than what she was up to.”

A STELLAR REPORTER

She was born and raised Mattie Smith on the South Side, and her father was the owner and operator of two taxi companies. A graduate of Chicago Public Schools, she studied journalism at Roosevelt and Northwestern universities.

“She was the kind of person that understood the importance of being well-informed, so journalism was a natural fit,” said her cousin Anne Fredd.

In 1950, Colin joined the staff at the Chicago Defender, which was founded in 1905 and considered for many years to be the nation’s most influential black weekly newspaper, with more than two-thirds of its readership outside of Chicago.

Scott recalled having long conversations with the late John H. Sengstacke, the Chicago Defender’s publisher during the time of the Till story, and Colin’s name would come up regularly.

“He described Mattie as a stellar reporter and talked about her in the same light as Ethel Payne,” Scott said.

Payne, who died in 1991, wrote front-page stories for the Chicago Defender and is known as the “First Lady of the Black Press.”

AN ELEGANT FIGURE

“He’d tell me these wonderful stories about Mattie and Ethel, how they’d hold their own against their male counterparts in the newsroom, and would speak of them only in the highest regard,” Scott said.

After many years as a reporter, Colin became the newspaper’s food and fashion editor. She continued working as an editor-at-large for the newspaper before leaving in 2002.

In his 2016 book “The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America,” Ethan Michaeli, a former investigative reporter at the Defender, wrote this about Colin:

“The features desk was manned by two editors from different generations: Soft-spoken, kind and polite, Mattie Smith Colin cast an elegant figure in the newsroom in her furs and jewels, her articles on fashion, food, literature and culture were crisply written and meticulously self-edited. Proud of having worked for the newspaper for many years, she never bragged about her work as a ‘hard news’ reporter, though she had covered the return of Emmett Till’s body to Chicago, among other stories.”

While still at the Defender, Colin began working for the Chicago Park District as a staff writer and spokeswoman. She later served as a staff assistant for the Department of Streets and Sanitation before retiring in 2011.

“Mattie was a real treasure, not just at the newspaper but for the city of Chicago as a whole,” Scott said.

Colin was married to Robert N. Colin Sr., a Chicago police officer, for 42 years before his death in 1992.

There were no immediate survivors.